


Try, Try Again

by roguewrld



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e11 Mystery Spot, M/M, Repeated looping of the Apocalypse, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 07:49:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1067897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roguewrld/pseuds/roguewrld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Day 2 - A Supernatural Season 3 fic set during "Mystery Spot." </p><p>“Really, Sam? Does it matter?” The Trickster leaned back in his chair and twisted the cap off his own bottle. “Is there something you wouldn’t give me, to save your brother’s soul?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Try, Try Again

Of all the things Sam was expecting to find at the Broward County Mystery Spot, the Trickster had to be pretty far down the list. He was lounging in a comfortable looking chair, eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, looking bored. “You’re late. Also, kind of stupid. Has anyone ever mentioned that?”

“You wouldn’t be the first.” Dean had his gun out, not that it would have been much use against a Trickster who was immune to a stake through the heart.

“Please.” He snapped his fingers and Dean froze, hand halfway inside his jacket. “Sammy, you and I need to have a conversation about your brother.”

“Why should I talk to you about anything?” Sam didn’t have anything wooden, but there had to be something in the room he could use.

“Because,” and suddenly the Trickster was standing beside him. “You two are in way over your heads.”

“I-“ The Trickster had no concept of personal space. “Could you maybe back off a little?”

“No. See, I’m trying to figure out what possessed your brother to sell his soul for you.” The Trickster stared intently at Sam, then shook his head. “Assholes.”

“Who?”

The Trickster finally took a step back. “They tied you together. You actually can’t help yourselves. You’d die a hundred times for each other.”

“He’s my brother.”     

“Yeah, yeah.” The Trickster threw himself back on the chair and snapped his fingers. Two bottles of beer appeared in his hands and he tossed one at Sam. “Alright, I’m in.”

“In.” Sam caught the bottle on instinct.

“Your brother is going to hell unless we do something and something drastic. Now, do you want my help or not?”

Sam took a swallow from the bottle, just to have a moment to think. “What’s the catch?”

“Really, Sam? Does it matter?” The Trickster leaned back in his chair and twisted the cap off his own bottle. “Is there something you wouldn’t give me, to save your brother’s soul?”

“No.” He would do anything to save Dean and everyone knew it. “But I still need to know.”

“Maybe I just don’t want to waste you and your brother’s comedic potential. You’ll be no fun when he’s dead.” The Trickster gave Sam what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile. “You humans, you never change. It’s the same old shit since the beginning of time, only the wrapper changes. ”

“And Dean and I are what, shiny wrappers?” It made about as much sense as anything else. `

“Exactly.” The Trickster was standing too close again. Sam hadn’t even blinked, he was that fast. “Let’s take a look then, see what happens if I stick around and lend a hand.” The Trickster touched Sam’s temple and time started up again.

* * *

**Take 1**

Gabriel poured maple syrup over his pancakes and thought the whole thing had gone over pretty well.

“What I don’t get is why the whole stake through the heart thing didn’t work.” Dean waved his fork at Gabriel’s chest. “That’s twice now you should be dead.”

“Your lore is bad.” The syrup hadn’t been real maple before, but it was now. Gabriel dunked a piece of sausage in a puddle of it. “When someone offers to help you, it’s rude to stab them in the chest. I liked this shirt.”

“I said I was sorry.” Dean shook hot sauce onto whatever it was he had ordered.

* * *

 

_Jus in Bello_

“You don’t have to hold your breath. They can’t see us.” As far as these things went, invisibility was a simple trick.

Dean pressed himself up against the wall as Henriksen and some cops searched the room. “Well pardon me if this whole thing is a little freaky.”

“Just stop. I can’t take you two anywhere.” Sam stepped out of the way of as Henriksen started tearing the room apart.

* * *

 

The Winchesters were drunk.

“Do you know what I think?” Sam was wobbling on his feet. “I don’t think you’re a Trickster.”

“Oh?” If he’d been a man, Sam would have been too tall for Gabriel to shoulder but fortunately he wasn’t a man.

“I think,” Sam tripped over the foot Gabriel had extended and landed face first on his bed. “I think you’re *the* Trickster. Are you a god? Are you Loki?”

“No. And yes.” Gabriel started to tug Sam’s boots off.

Sam rolled over onto his stomach and hugged his pillow. Gabriel threw a blanket over him and opened the blinds so they would get lots of early morning sun. “You saved us. If they’d caught us, it would have been all over.”

“You’re welcome.”

* * *

 

_Long Distance Call_

He grabbed Dean as soon as he walked out of the hotel room. “It’s not your father. Your father is in Heaven.”

“You don’t know that.” Dean tried to grab for his phone.

“I do.” John Winchester hadn’t been a good man, but he’d never broken. He was in heaven, Gabriel was sure of it. “Whoever called you, it wasn’t John Winchester.”

“Fine.” Dean leaned against the wall and just stared for a minute. “Are you gonna sit around and watch us sleep all night again? What kind of thing are you, that you don’t sleep? Maybe I don’t want you tagging along anymore. Maybe I want some fucking privacy for once.”

Dean wouldn’t listen to reason. “Fine. You know what, when you’re actually ready to accept my help, you tell your brother to call for me.”

* * *

 

“Loki.” He could hear Sam’s voice calling for him. When he got to the hotel room, they were sitting on their beds, watching TV.

Dean didn’t look away from the TV, but he muttered, “You were right.”

“Wish I hadn’t been. It would have been easier if it had been him.”  Gabriel snapped his fingers and put a chair between the beds. Sam tossed him a beer.

Their alarm went off at 3 am, just after they’d managed to get to sleep.

* * *

 

_Time Is On My Side_

“What’s it like, being immortal?”

The question came out of the blue and Gabriel looked up from his book to where Sam was reading the newspaper. “Lonely.”

“But you chose to be alone. You have brothers, family. You could be with them.” Sam set down the newspaper and picked up his copy of John Winchester’s journal.

“No, I couldn’t.” He could never go home again, not without giving up the freedom and free will he’d carved out for himself. “Sometimes there’s no going back.”

“Maybe.” Sam tore something out of the paper and tucked it into his own hunting notebook. “I need to make some calls.”

* * *

 

When it’s after midnight and they’re safe in a different hotel, Sam went to sleep. Dean waited until he was out then went into the hallway and whispered, “Loki. You here?”

“I’m here.” Gabriel materialized behind Dean, as close as he could just to see the man jump.

“Don’t let him.” Dean looked around, to make sure no one was listening. “He’ll do anything to save me. Stop him. Keep him safe.”

“Your brother doesn’t want to be safe.” They couldn’t banish him, didn’t know the rituals but he couldn’t help if they didn’t let him.

“That makes it your job to keep him alive. He said you didn’t want anything but I get it. When you work alone, live alone, it eats at you. You can do all the jobs in the world and it doesn’t make it all less empty.” Dean didn’t step away, he leaned in closer. “You wanted a partner, someone to keep you company. So you’re going to patch Sammy up when I’m gone and keep him alive, because for some reason he puts up with your shit.”

They were totally obsessed with each other and who could blame them? Soulmates crammed into brother’s bodies, tied tighter than any siblings should be. “What, exactly, do you want me to do if you die, Dean?”

“Whatever it takes, to keep him safe.”

* * *

  
_No Rest for the Wicked_

When there were two days left on his clock, Dean slammed shut the book he was reading and turned to Gabriel. “Ruby told me there was no way to save me.”

“I don’t believe that.” He had a few years on Ruby and more power in his back pocket than even a witch turned demon could imagine. “Lilith is just another demon. We’ll kill her.” He would save Dean Winchester from the pit and stop the apocalypse in it’s tracks.

“You got some special demon killing mojo you never mentioned?” Interest was edging out despair on Dean’s face.

“I told you I would save you. Did you think I was kidding?” It might attract attention, and he might have to run afterwards, but he could do it. “It won’t be easy. I have a lot of enemies, I make a noise that big and they might come looking.”

“But you’d do it. For Sammy.” Not for Dean, himself, but for Sam. That was about the shape of it.

“Yes.”

* * *

 

He sat in their backseat and listened to them sing Bon Jovi and almost felt like part of the family. The problem was, when they get to New Harmony the bitch had pulled up stakes. There was just a terrified family and a little girl who was never going to see the light of day again.

The ambulances came and went, and the coroner’s bus too. Gabriel sat, invisible, on the hood of a police car, watching. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. No hell hounds, no Lilith, no demons. They sent Bobby home an hour ago and he’d just been watching since then.

He slid off the car and walked to the next block where the Impala was parked and climbed into the back seat. “So, that was a bust.”

“No kidding.” Dean was fiddling with his hex bag. “She knew we were coming. Could she have spotted you?”

“No.” He’d tamped his power down tight, made extra sure. “The real question is, what’s in those hex bags?”

Sam handed his over. “Ruby said-”

“Ruby said a lot of things.” Gabriel unrolled the bag and barely restrained himself from blowing out the windows of the Impala. “These are not protecting you from Lilith’s gaze. They’ve been spying on you. For months, probably.” On the surface, they *felt* right. He should have made sure, should have cracked one open.

Dean pounded the dashboard. “What the hell, man? What was the point? Did she want us to come gunning for her, send Ruby to drop breadcrumbs?”

“I trusted her.” Sam sounded so angry and that was good. He’d need that anger.

“Yeah, well, you’ve got shit taste in women.” Dean turned the car on. “I haven’t seen a hallucination in around four hours and no one ever showed up to drag me down to hell. Loki, you got any theories?”

“Nothing that will help you sleep tonight.” If they’d been watched, they wouldn’t have seen an angel but a pagan god, old and powerful in his own right keeping watch over the Winchesters. Lilith wouldn’t have wanted to go up against that, not if she didn’t have to. They couldn’t start the apocalypse without Dean, without a righteous man in hell.

“Wonderful.” Sam leaned his head against the passenger window. “We won this round. So why do I feel like we lost?”

* * *

 

He didn’t figure it out until it was too late.

They had a year of quiet, of hunting small scale prey and asking questions no one had any answers to. Ruby wasn’t stupid enough to show her face, which was unfortunate because Gabriel was sure he could have made her talk.

In the meantime, the weather was getting squirrely and the West coast was being pounded apart by earthquakes. It was keeping Sam up nights. “Something is wrong. Can you feel it?”

“I feel it.” The TV news was droning on and Gabriel made himself pay attention. “Did he say 66 students?”

Sam turned up the volume. - No one knows what could have pushed this veteran teacher to turn on her own students. There are many more wounded from the improvised explosive devices and at least 66 students are dead.-

“That’s a bad omen if I’ve ever seen one.” Sam muted the tv before it could wake up Dean. “Should we head to New York, check it out? Loki, you okay?”

Gabriel was sure he looked terrible. “It’s the end of the world. It’s the apocalypse.”

Sam must have thought he was trying to make a joke. “I think I’d notice if you were gone long enough to bring about Ragnarok.”

“I’m not joking!” They’d gotten the damn thing started without the lead players. How had they done that? “These are the seals on Lucifer’s cage breaking.”

“You’re talking about Revelations. That’s not even your apocalypse.” On screen, news cameras were showing devastating storms pounding Florida.

“It’s everyone’s apocalypse now.”

* * *

 

They hole up at Bobby’s, researching the end of the world. “The only way to get this ball rolling was for a righteous man to spill blood in hell.” Gabriel had pulled all the right books off the shelves and hoped no one was paying too close attention. “A good man made a deal with a demon and when he was down there, picked up a blade.”

He could see Dean squirm out of the corner of his eye. It was a little close to home. “So, we’re looking for someone who made a crossroads deal?”

“It couldn’t just be anyone.” He’d thought, they’d all thought, it would have to be a Winchester. “It would have to be someone special.” The boys had cousins, but they were all Campbells. They wouldn’t have the bloodline Micheal needed and who knew where Lucifer had dug up another vessel?

“So, we find a crossroads demon and ask some questions.”

* * *

 

He’d blessed a good knife and made up a story about Kurdish demon killing blades. They didn’t ask questions, they trusted him. The thing was, Crossroad Demons were tough nuts to crack and neither of them were experts at torture. “Let me try.”

“Here.” Sam tossed him the knife.

“Go wait in the car.” Gabriel could see him hesitate. “Do you really want to know what I’m capable of? Do you want to see it up close, see what you let into your car?”

“Leave him be, Sammy.” Dean grabbed Sam by the elbow. “Let the man work.”

He ended up having to almost burn her out before she talked but she gave in before he had to kill her and try and dig another one up. “It was a kid. Sold himself for his mom.”

“And? That’s not enough, not to break the seal.” He pressed his hand to her forehead. “You have to be special, to start the apocalypse. Otherwise, anyone could do it. Tell me who he is.”

“Milligan.” She spit the name in his face, her vessel’s blood mixed with spit. “Adam Milligan. He traded himself for her, it was a fair deal.”

* * *

 

_May 14th, 2009_

It was late before they made any progress, before it occurred to Sam they could just Facebook the kid. “Adam Milligan, born in September 1990, in Windom, Minnesota.” Sam turned the laptop so Gabriel and Dean could read the screen. “Your average nineteen year old kid, pre-med. There’s no hint of the supernatural in his life, nothing to mark him as the kind of person who would even know how to sell his soul at the crossroads.”

“Maybe he was a Robert Johnson fan.” Dean was staring at the photo. “Does he look familiar to anyone else?”

“I guess?” Sam looked at the photo again, then shrugged. “So, his mom dies and there’s no dad. He does whatever it takes to save her, and the demon gives him a short turn-around deal. This kid goes to hell and… what? Who got him out so he could pitch in for the apocalypse.”

“Only a being of incredible power can pull a soul out of hell.” Only an angel, but he couldn’t tell them that. “Considering the source material, I’m going to go with angels.”

“Angels.” Dean shook his head. “We share a hotel room with a god a few times a week but I’m not buying angels exist.”

“We’ve been there before. It was just a restless spirit.” Sam slouched back in his chair.

“Angels exist. God exists.” They would need wards, to protect them. He should have put them there the moment he saw the news report.

“You’re serious?” Dean gave him that ‘you’re just scamming us’ look. “You telling me my mom was right when she said angels were watching over us?”

“Yes.” They were drinking a beer with one now, not that he’d ever say so. “But don’t expect the guardian angel fluffy wing bullshit. Angels are soldiers and right now they’re at war.”

“How do we fight angels?” Sam’s fingers were hovering over the keyboard, as if he was trying to figure out what search terms to put in.

“We put up wards.” Gabriel grabbed a knife from the pile Dean had been cleaning earlier. “They need to be drawn in blood.” The clock on the nightstand turned over to midnight and Gabriel forgot what he’d been about to say. The radio in the back of his brain, the one he had muted long ago, was suddenly going full blast.

He wasn’t sure how long he drifted, until Sam’s shouts and shakes brought him back to himself. “Loki. Loki, answer me.”

“Too late.” The last seal had broken. “It’s too late, it’s already started.”

* * *

 

Sam was suddenly on his knees. He wasn’t in the hotel room anymore, he was back in the Mystery Spot and Loki’s hand was on the back of his neck. “Breathe, kid, it’s okay.”

“What just happened?” Dean was still frozen in place on the other side of the room, hand in his jacket reaching for the stake Sam hadn’t know was there a year ago. “How are we back here?”

“We never left.” Loki wrapped an arm around him and pulled him to his feet. “We were peeking, not living it.”

“No, no that was real.” It had been a whole year, he had lived every day of it.

“It wasn’t. It was a trick.” Loki was back in his recliner, Sam hadn’t even seen him move. “So, saving your brother seems to have had some… side effects.”

“The world ended! That’s a bit more than a side effect.” Sam took a deep breath and tried not to fall over. His beer was still on the floor next to his chair and he grabbed it like a lifeline. “Can we try again?”

“As many times as we need to.” Loki snapped his fingers and Sam’s beer bottle turned into ginger ale. “Don’t puke. Drink that.”

“If they’re watching us already, what are they seeing?” The useless hex bag was still in his backpack, because he was an idiot and had trusted a demon.

“Me torturing you. Killing your brother every which way I can.” Loki said it like it was obvious. “They’re seeing what I want them to see. I’ve warded this place. As of today, it really is a mystery spot.”

Sam took a swallow of ginger ale. It didn’t settle his stomach but it gave him something to do. “Okay, so saving Dean turned out to be a really bad idea. What else can we try?”


End file.
